Meet Your Brain: The Amygdala

The amygdala is a really important part of your brain’s emotional processing centre (Limbic system). You have one buried deep in each hemisphere of your brain and they are about the size and shape of an almond (Amygdalon- is Latin for almond). It is often thought of as a ‘threat detector’ or a panic button in the brain although its role is really much broader than that. Like all parts of your brain the amygdala is always on. It is always scanning what’s going on in and around you and picking up the ‘emotional tone’ of every event but it is particularly sensitive to any possible threats. Scientists have investigated the amygdala by putting people in MRI scanners and looking at their brain activity while they are shown different faces. These studies have shown that the amygdala is responsive to both happy and sad faces but it is especially primed to activate in response to fearful or potentially threatening imputs.

Activation of the amygdala does all the things that you would want your body to do when threatened. You become very alert, your heart rate and breathing rate speed up, your muscles tense up ready to fly or flee, adrenaline floods into your blood stream which inhibits non-urgent body systems (such as digestion, immunity and reproduction) and ramps up your body’s emergency systems.

The amygdala can definitely cause some problems if it gets too active or starts reacting to things that it shouldn’t. It becomes more sensitised when your body’s levels of stress hormones (Cortisol) are too high. Cortisol tells the Amygdala that you are in a dangerous situation and you need to be more alert to threats- this is why stress states can become a real vicious cycle. The more stressed you are the more active your amygdala will be and therefore the more reactive you’ll be to stressful situations.

Importantly the amygdala operates on two different circuits- one is automatic and unconscious the other is conscious.

Using Neurolink and/or Acupuncture we can dampen down the amygdala through the unconscious track. There is good evidence that acupuncture can help to reduce activity in the amygdala and although it hasn’t been formally researched I believe that Neurolink can definitely help with this too.

If you’ve been feeling a bit ‘wired’ and stressed out lately there are a few simple things that you can do for yourself by harnessing the power of the conscious track to the amygdala. Research shows that simply using your conscious awareness to label how you’re feeling helps to activate a part of your brain (Left pre-frontal cortex if you’re curious) which dampens down the amygdala activity by a significant amount.

So why don’t you take a few moments out of your day every now and then to tune into yourself and ask yourself “How am I feeling right now?”